Does Yea Forums like Bob Dylan?

Keep politics out of Yea Forumssic, (((Zimmerman)))

He sounds like he has a head cold, other than that the vocals don't seem unusually bad (certainly not as bad as Xgau makes it sound). I mean, he stays in pitch, doesn't crack, and can hold a melody. But it's not really his age so much as the fact that he never had the right voice for traditional pop to begin with. I don't see a 30 year old Dylan being able to sound like Sinatra either.

The band is really slow and depressive-sounding though I suppose it fits an old man in his twilight years.

Sinatra actually wasn't terrible on Duets even though he sounded every bit his 77 years. Crackly and raspy but still loads of character and color.

>"It was a real privilege to make this album. I've wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a 5-piece band. That's the key to all these performances. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way. They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day."

Fair enough and I only wish more young artists understood this instead of abusing ProTools and Autotune. It'll be sad when we don't have any of the guys of Dylan's era anymore.

neck yourself, boomer

He's one of my absolute favorite artists these days.

What I would have liked to hear is Sinatra's LP of Dylan songs, focused on Blonde on Blonde (Sad Eyed Lady, Just Like a Woman, Visions....)

Yeah I do not understand the mocking of Sinatra, a profound artist.

Oh well, that's life. :^)

Ironic of you to quote a song Frank disliked (along with Strangers in the Night) and regretted recording. I was dead-serious when I said I would have liked to see him cover Dylan, especially Dylan's ballads. Especially in his old man voice. Sinatra often performed songs in concert with just a guitar or piano. Such an arrangement of Just Like a Woman or Sad Eyed Lady would have been among the greatest Dylan covers ever.

don't give two shits what Yea Forums thinks. But yes, I do like Bob.

I think BOTT is his finest hour. A masterpiece.

But then, there's Mr. Tambourine Man, which is unsurpassed as a song. So who knows.

>Such an arrangement of Just Like a Woman or Sad Eyed Lady

I somehow have a hard time imagining Sinatra singing those lyrics.

>abusing ProTools and Autotune
you sound like an idiot

Maybe in time, when you reach the age of 18 and grow out of mumble rap, you will develop a deeper appreciation for Sinatra, his lyrics, and stories. I hope you start learning more about the man.

even the name of the record is superb. Blood on the (train) tracks. Blood on the (record) tracks.

>Maybe in time, when you reach the age of 18 and grow out of mumble rap, you will develop a deeper appreciation for Sinatra, his lyrics, and stories

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I’m a keen songwriter and a former Dylan obsessive. Have listened to every song he has written as far as I am aware and travelled from Scotland to Italy to see him live. I don’t listen to him much these days though, I prefer singing his songs for myself on guitar as I cover them pretty well and when I write songs I no longer consciously try to be Dylanesque.

Into John Prine in a big way right now, if I could write a song as good as The Glory of True Love I’d be elated.

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I think Sinatra could have done an excellent version of Just Like a Woman.

Not Sad Eyed Lady though, too much bullshit lyrics and too long for him.

Well that was condescending. I was making a few jokes about Sinatra, yes, but I do understand and appreciate the man and his work. I'm also aware that in his later career he recorded a number of questionable covers of contemporary pop. But that was a minor blemish on a sterling career. Still, Blonde on Blonde is Dylan at his most smart-allecky. Most covers of the songs lose the sarcastic element and therefore the point. If we're going to suggest Sinatra cover a Dylan song, maybe something like I Threw It All Away would have fit him better. A bit of the "down on me" "underdog" vibe that Sinatra was great at capturing. Simple Twist Of Fate would be another one, and for similar reasons. I'd say If Not For You, but it's almost too obvious.

The widely recognized masterpieces of Blonde on Blonde--notably Visions of Johanna and Just Like a Woman--are smart-allecky?

Absolutely they are. Not to mention some of his funniest lyrics. All contributing to their masterpiece status.

Presumably "Full Moon..." is one of the better songs of the 23 they cut. It's not bad, but wouldn't make me forget Sinatra, or even Jack Jones for that matter. Those guys had an abiding commitment to classic material, and that material was written, inspired constructed, designed... to be annunicated and sung by someone with those kind of pipes. It's a free country so Bob and Columbia Records can do whatever they want. But this seems to make about as much sense as Dean Martin singing "Gates of Eden".

Probably the only absolutely earnest and sincere song Bob wrote between Highway 61 and John Wesley Harding was I Threw It All Away. He’s always been a massive piss taker.

This isn't so much Dylan Sings Sinatra as it is Dylan Pays Attention To Sinatra's Taste In Songs. To put it another way, Dylan has long paid homage and deference to the songwriting of the folk/blues/country & western tradition, often covering songs himself or the influence of those songs influencing his writing and singing. To think of Sinatra as a guy who breezily and insouciantly yelped out songs that spoke to mid-20th century entitlement such as "I've Got The World on a String" and "Come Fly With Me" do a huge disservice to the man and misunderstands who he was.

Sinatra's first love was always the Great American Songbook. It's a much different tradition than what Dylan built his reputation on, but it does seem in line with Dylan's spirit of adventurousness. Is it a gimmicky marketing hook to talk about Sinatra tributes in his centennial? No doubt. But the song selection, to me, tells the true story. Dylan was paying attention and it shows.

While I kind of see your point, it's very odd and off-putting how boomers like him, Linda Ronstadt, and Rod Stewart who made their name on rebellion and casting off the previous generation's values/music should eventually come back around to those songs. Guess the childhood nostalgia for the Great American Songbook was too strong to overcome?

What the fuck do you think popular music is? Lyrics are essential to the form, dumbass.

His voice was great on those albums. The arrangements are really good too.

Reread carefully. When Dylan talks of "uncovering" those songs, he means stripping them of all the Vegas/Tin Pan Alley glitz and presenting them at their most bare and essential. And yes I agree Sinatra did come off to a lot of people as an entitled mid-century playboy surrounded by martini glasses and loose women, but that's only a small part of his story. Leave it to Bob to reframe Sinatra his way.

This is a music board. Pop and folk are shit-tier forms of music, Dylan and Shakur included. Lyrics certainly are essential to the form when there's not much to the form in the first place, no? It's kinda like discussing comic books on Yea Forums. You are an embarassment.

Does Sinatra really need to be re-framed? This is a lot like Gram Parsons' take on country music: a way for rock fans who aren't actively engaged with the source material and tradition to feel like they are engaging with it, because a safely "rock" artist is performing the material in a way they can can comprehend.

Whether or not Frank partied in Vegas with 1950s sluts doesn't make him any less of an American titan than Dylan, who smoked pot and wore silly hats in his early days.

>music board
>Pop and folk are shit-tier forms of music
>music board
You're opinion is worthless. kys.

So to you Gram Parsons is "country for dummies?" That is very interesting--I think of him as someone who stripped all the extra baggage that went with people drawing the line between country, rock and "singer-songwriter," to get to the real meat of the art forms.

>Pop and folk are shit-tier forms of music,
Why?

>has to ask

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Also to assume that he has the same artistic/cultural goals as he might have had 50 years ago (or not -- we always project with Dylan, and he's tended to contract himself consistently) is rather absurd to me.

Sure, he's absolutely free to have whatever cultural goal he wants to have right now: if he wants to interpret some tunes associated with Sinatra, more power to him. I'll stick with my Sinatra records, whether he was an entitled 1950s playboy who drank martinis and fucked every Hollywood actress there was (as if the boomers never did that).

Oh get to fuck, it’s possible to enjoy more than one genre of music.

Yes, it's a music board where we discuss music

Explain it. Use music theory in your answer btw

No but I do believe Parsons in the long run was the father of pop country ie. stripping off the raw edges and making it accessible to the rock/pop audience. That's not to say you can't love both him and Willie Nelson at the same time.

The boomers didn't kill the Tin Pan Alley style of songwriting, it died a natural death before the first boomer sprouted his first pubic hair. Sinatra was saying before the 40s were out that great songwriting was dead. Changing tastes, the death/aging out of key songwriters, and a changing music business all played a part. There's no question the boomers radically changed the relationship between performer and song, but I don't think there's any conflict with a transformational figure harkening back to an era that he helped to close---Sinatra himself is a great example of that. After all, his career peak came in the 50s-60s and if anything symbolized the new, slick, high-tech postwar world. And yet, in the end, Sinatra toured until he physically no longer could, becoming, in my mind, the last great band leader.

I'm not knocking Sinatra--I love him too. But some people might associate him with certain cultural signifiers, which does his artistry a disservice. When you go down that road, you end up like Christgau where the artist's image or fanbase become more important than the actual message of the song (ie. I can't listen to metal because I imagine my old high school bullies would like it) Some people might think they don't like Sinatra because it comes off as pastiche or a parody of itself, but when you dig deeper and see the music he was choosing to sing and the interpretive decisions he was making, it's pretty flooring. Sinatra doesn't need to be reframed, especially by Dylan, but I see it as a worthwhile project that puts both artists in a new context.

Dylan once called himself a song and dance man. Just because he sometimes comes off as a wiseguy doesn't mean there's not some truth and sincerity in there. It seems that a whole generation of fans have been projecting their beliefs onto him, and wilfully selecting only the bits they wanted to hear.

That Dylan almost single-handedly destroyed the so-called Tin Pan Alley mode of songwriting is a pretty standard compliment doled out to Dylan by his admirers: here's an recent example from an interview in The Atlantic with Sean Wilentz, American history professor at Princeton University and "historian-in-residence" at bobdylan.com, and author of Bob Dylan in America, and, thus, I presume, not someone with an axe to grind with Dylan or his work.

lol imagine in 2019 discrediting an entire genre of music

If anything good comes out of Dylan covering Sinatra, perhaps it would be that some number of Dylan/rock fans who haven't previously seen past the stereotypes surrounding Sinatra the man, and the myth, would discover a record like Songs for Young Lovers and see just how amazing it is.

I believe that when Wilentz uses the term "Tin Pan Alley" in the sentence "Bob Dylan killed Tin Pan Alley," he is talking more about the Tin Pan Alley of Rodgers and Hart than about the Tin Pan Alley of Goffin and King. And talking more about Dylan's personal/surrealistic/stream-of-consciousness lyric style destroying the notion of a "well-crafted song" with a universal sentiment that anyone could sing, although I suppose vestiges of that ideal survive in something like "Just Like a Woman."

Having said that, there's no question that Sinatra or Crosby looked and sounded like someone's grandpa from a boomer POV (ie. hopelessly quaint and old-fashioned) and the actions of Dylan et al were a large part of the reason why that did happen. Undoubtedly it takes breaking out of the rockist mindset to appreciate the Great American Songbook and we see that Dylan, Ronstadt, and Stewart managed to do it.

On his '15 US tour, Dylan swapped out Blowin' In The Wind from the setlist for Stay With Me, which seems to mean a lot to him for whatever reason.

I don't think the Tin Pan Alley tradition ever completely died, rather it evolved with the times into something more contemporary. I mean, it's not as if Surrealistic Pillow or Master of Reality ever represented even the majority of music people in the 60s-70s were listening to, let alone after that.

Meaning TPA as a tradition or a business model? Because as says, during the era of Woodstock and acid, the old guard like Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were still putting out strong-selling albums and performing to a sizable, if aging fanbase. So were Broadway musicals featuring Great American Songbook numbers. And plenty of rockers like McCartney, Joel, Costello, Newman, Davies, etc were keeping the TPA tradition alive.

If you mean TPA as a business model where songwriters would come out with a song and all the singers and bands would be in a rush to release their version of it, well, that model died out in the postwar years and Dylan and the Beatles are largely why it did with the event of the self-contained singer-songwriter who wrote his own songs to be performed by himself. And then again, maybe not seeing as to how the Beatles and Dylan certainly created their own set of standards that scores of rock performers covered.

Ok but another shift in the culture was in how the GASB songwriters wrote songs for everyone to sing, so there's no definitive version of them, while anyone doing Desolation Row or Yesterday is merely covering it and it will always be judged against the original.

Granted, but then again the most universal and covered Beatles songs are ones like Yesterday that are the closest to the Tin Pan Alley mold and can be sung by anyone. I mean, I doubt Sinatra could have done Helter Skelter, yet he did cover Something.

And Dylan's most covered songs are the folk/TPA-kind of ones like Blowin' In The Wind or Masters of War. A song like Desolation Row or Ballad of a Thin Man would not qualify and far fewer covers of that are done.

There may be outliers such as "All Along the Watchtower" that have been heavily covered, but Dylan's whole career is an outlier in many ways.

That's only because the song was covered so quickly and so powerfully. Most people doing AATWT are covering Jimi Hendrix, not Dylan.

There are few things that I find so predictable as the comments about Dylan's voice that always occur when he's up for discussion.

Without a doubt Bob's voice has been far from pleasant for a good 15 years. During this period he has delivered some very successful work both (IMO) artistically and commercially. Modern times sold over 2 million copies and Together Through Life was nr one. Tempest is an album that-I believe-will be discussed and enjoyed long after most current music will be forgotten.
Dylan might be- one of the greatest writers and artists of our time-maybe of all time.
To reduce this artist to a mindless discussion of his voice are imo inaccurate when it comes to the big picture
But if you don't like don t listen. And of course Dylans work should be critized-but it s so much more than his voice

I'm pretty sure people have argued over Dylan's voice since JFK still had a head on his shoulders. I think the 70s was when he really peaked as a vocalist. Since the mid-2000s his voice has gone considerably downhill, and he's lucky that he gets away with it due to some excellent material and an excellent band as well as his unblemished gift for phrasing.

When it comes to Sinatra covers, yes it is a problem but his voice on SITN is surprisingly good. He sounds aged, but he manages to deliver the melodies and with the delicacy the material requires instead of his gruff blues/folk voice. Most importantly, he does it in a way that sounds convincing. Of course a lot of people won't like it and that's fine, opinions are opinions.

For me, it's Desire

>And then again, maybe not seeing as to how the Beatles and Dylan certainly created their own set of standards that scores of rock performers covered
What say, I think it's too bad that Paul McCartney's many good to excellent late career albums have been written off by the music critic establishment who decided since the 70s that he was a promoter of mindless pop fluff and didn't have Dylan or Neil Young's cool factor.

The pivotal point in Dylan's critical standing being restated was the near death illness of 96-97 just before TOOM. I think then music journalists decided Bob was back in vogue and something of a sacred cow. Neil Young for example retained critical acceptance in the UK during most of his career whereas Dylan was seen as washed up...in reality a nonsense but then NY has worked hard at being edgy Dylan's just spent time being Dylan.

You also have to accept music journalism in the UK went from extreme critical autopsies to it's current state of promotional acceptance--everything is OK and some things are great.

As such as a Dylan nut I'm happy to accept that most Dylan work post '97 is a tad overrated.

this right here

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Love and Theft is the last truly excellent Dylan album imo. Tempest and Modern Times are good but also have some dud tracks on them. Together Through Life isn't bad. The Christmas album is a bit hard to digest between the soft girl backing vocals and Dylan's gruff voice. It's entertaining for what it is though.

Arguing over the evolution of his voice is beating a dead horse and I guess you just kind of have to take it for what it is. All the Internet arguments in the world ain't gonna bring back Bob's 1975 pipes.

Sony has done an excellent job marketing him as well.

And yes the job he did on SITN was surprising better than most of us expected.

IDIOTTTTTTTTTTT WINNNNNNNDD, BLOWIN LIKE A CIRCLE AROUND MY SKULLLLLLLL
FROM THE GRAND COULE DAM TO THE CAPITOLLLLLL
IDIOOTTTT WINNNNDDDDDDDD, BLOWIN EVERY TIME YOU MOVVE YOUR TEETH
YOU'RE AN IIIIIDIOT BABE
IT'S A WONDER THAT YOU STILL KNOW HOW TO BREATHHH

He does it because he wants to and why would a guy in his 70s still give a shit what anyone thinks or have anything left to prove? I'm sure he loves the GASB and wants to honor it and it took until he was a literal senior citizen before he felt brave enough to take on this material. And not unlike Brian Wilson doing Gershwin and paying tribute to a great influence in his musical life; I think Bob is doing the same. Brian Wilsons Gershwin is not going to supercede Good Vibrations and Dylan's Sinatra is not going to take the place of Blowin' In The Wind. Nor is is it meant to.

I don't see him putting out any more rock-flavored material at this point and another Love and Theft would be flattering. But I don't think he should simply hang up his guitar and retire, I mean I'd still rather hear his 21st century output any day over mumble rap or Parawhore.

Also taking these diversions from writing new material may give him time to come up with/stockpile new songs especially since at his age one doesn't expect him to write as quickly and prolifically as he did when he was 25.

I don't think you're quite correct here. NY's 80s output got as much of a critical mauling as Dylan's and with very good reason too. Both NY and Dylan coincidentally rebounded in 1989: Dylan with "Oh Mercy" and Young with "Freedom". However, Neil sustained a good critical reception for each album that followed up to "Broken Arrow" where the wheel fell off again. Since then it's been rightly variable as indeed his output has been mostly average to poor. Dylan on the other hand fell off a cliff with the follow-up to Mercy. It wasn't until TOOM that he rebounded again. I think, with the exceptions of TTL, Xmas, and Tempest, his work has been fairly consistently great...brilliant in fact, but not quite at the level of the mid-60's and probably at the same level as BOTT.

Also let's not forget that the Millenial-aged writers at P4k aren't the same people reviewing Dylan 40 years ago. Current music critics grew up having it drilled into their heads that the man was a legend while the critics of Christgau's era were the ones who had to watch his career unfold and decide whether he was a legend or not.

Ok but you still can't sell me on the idea that >1997 Dylan is up to the same level of 1965 Dylan.

Ok but still, you couldn't argue that he didn't get his groove back after years of mediocre albums in the 80s-early 90s. He became the first artist of the rock era to really write songs from the POV of an old man who looks back on his life and reflects on how more of it is behind him than ahead of him. Also he got back his sense of humor, something conspicuously absent since probably the early 70s. Love and Theft was probably his funniest album since Bringing It All Back Home.

>He became the first artist of the rock era to really write songs from the POV of an old man who looks back on his life and reflects on how more of it is behind him than ahead of him

You do know that plenty of his contemporaries like Ray Davies were writing songs like that in their 20s. You had Paul Simon (Old Friends), Paul McCartney (When I'm Sixy-Four, Eleanor Rigby), Neil Young (Old Man), Rod Argent (A Rose For Emily) all doing that kind of stuff long before Dylan had gray hair.

Dude wut. Old Man was _addressing_ an old man, not singing from the POV of one. And while you sort of have a point with the other songs mentioned there, none of them did what Dylan has done since Modern Times, which is actually write from an old man POV. Those songs are more like what a 20-something imagines being old might be like. Quite different from 21st century Dylan reflecting back on his life.

>Old Man was _addressing_ an old man, not singing from the POV of one
Strictly speaking, yes, but in Neil's defense, the song is sympathizing with the old man rather than a juvenile "Hope I die before I get old" perspective. Likewise, "Eleanor Rigby" and "A Rose for Emily," in my opinion, get to the same heart of darkness that "Not Dark Yet" does, decades before Dylan did.

Was Time Out of Mind the first rock album to write from this perspective over the course of an entire album? Maybe so, although I haven't listened to every Leonard Cohen record. But the original "Dylan was the first rocker ever to contemplate mortality in song" is the usual hyperbolic exaggeration that sadly comes with territory of his being good enough to inspire Dylanolatry, or whatever you want to call it. Great as he is, he's not the only great lyricist in rock history, not everything he's ever written is pure genius, and he's not the "only person ever" to do X, Y, or Z.

>Great as he is, he's not the only great lyricist in rock history, not everything he's ever written is pure genius, and he's not the "only person ever" to do X, Y, or Z.
I agree and let's be honest that the 80s were mostly a wash for him and those albums not worth listening to. Come to think of it, I'm not even all that fond of his 70s material outside BOTT. I won't dispute that he didn't put out a bad album in the 60s other than maybe Nashville Skyline.

Here’s a hell of a song on much the same theme

youtu.be/FJ85Hep0kD0

Ok yeah there's a fine line between a song like When I'm Sixty-Four, written by a 25 year old Paul McCartney, and Together Through Life, written by a 68 year old Bob Dylan. But Dylan's also not the only artist to address old age in his late career. Kris Kristofferson did and Leonard Cohen and even a few recent McCartney numbers like The End of the End.

Still, wouldn't you say it's a bigger leap of imagination for McCartney to write Eleanor Rigby at 25 than it is for Dylan to write Beyond Here Lies Nothing at 68? I mean, writing about being old when you are old doesn't take that much imagination, just as it's not very challenging for a 20-something to write My Generation. It's much more out-of-left-field for a 20-something to write Eleanor Rigby and takes some considerable imagination to put yourself into the title character's shoes.

Having said that, I'll give young Bob his due in this regard, and note that part of what makes "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" so stunningly powerful is how Dylan sympathizes with Carroll not just as someone who is oppressed and a victim, but as someone who is old, tired, and worn out: as I just said, this is an imaginative/sympathetic leap that not every young person can make.

>I agree and let's be honest that the 80s were mostly a wash for him and those albums not worth listening to
Not even Infidels or A Shot of Love?

God no, those albums are terrible. Infidels (worst album title and cover art in Dylan's catalog) might have been better if all the songs left off of it had been included and all the songs included been left off. Shot of Love is irredeemable, even Every Grain of Sand, his single best 80s song, can't save it. Be thankful for Biograph.

Oh well we fundamentally disagree on this. In The Summertime, Sand, Jokerman, I & I , Lenny Bruce, Heart Of Mine, Licence To Kill, Don't Fall Apart for me make your opinion redundant for me, and Dylan's best song of the 80's? Probably Blind Willie McTell.

FWIW Sinatra did September of My Years in 1965 and he was only 50 at the time. Give it a spin if you haven't.

I should add the production quality on SITN is excellent and you can hear his every breath.

How about She Shot Me Down where the slightly wavery quality of his 66 year old voice adds to the poignancy of the songs.

Surprised at the high notes he was still able to reach on That Lucky Old Sun.

Nashville Skyline Dylan would've had a right voice for the songs.

>I'm sure he loves the GASB and wants to honor it and it took until he was a literal senior citizen before he felt brave enough to take on this material
FWIW he said he wanted to cover traditional pop standards in the 70s but CBS rejected that idea which resulted in Street-Legal instead.

P4k whined about the 30 bpm tempos while comparing them with uptempo Sinatra albums like Come Swing With Me, forgetting that Sinatra had plenty of slow ones like In The Wee Small Hours.

I'd mostly agree but he has his moments. High Water (For Charley Patton), Sugar Babe and Mississippi are as good as any of his 60$ songs.

Uh huh. I get the feeling that that reviewer is like the majority of stupid people who think Sinatra was a one-dimensional Vegas lounge cat with women hanging off his arms while completely ignoring the slow/soulful side of him, otherwise he'd understand what Dylan was trying to go for and that was not fast songs like I've Got The World on a String.

Blind Willie is one of his best songs. can't believe he left it off the album. He originally considered Bowie, Zappa and Elvis Costello to produce the album but wound up getting Mark Knopfler instead. A Bowie version of the album would have been incredible.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that "Lucky Old Sun" is a plea for death and therefore in keeping with the darker themes of Bob's late-period work.

The slow Sinatra albums still had drive to them and great Gordon Jenkins arrangements. Believe me, they don't sound as sluggish (and I mean sluggish with a capital S) the way SITN does.

Of course. Think ITWSH or She Shot Me Down, not Come Dance With Me.

There are moments in SITN where you can almost hear Dylan's Highway 66 voice just like on Duets you can hear fleeting glimpses of Sinatra's Songs For Young Lovers voice. It's there for about 2-3 notes and it's gone as fast as it came. I don't think it's an essential Dylan album, but I do think it's a successful experiment that does what it sets out to do. I don't think it's an embarrassment. Although I have to say I just don't understand those that give Sinatra's Stay With Me short shrift.

>mfw I can't afford Scotch anymore

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Lay off the bottle you fucking drunk.